Abstract Bongaigaon Thermal Power Project is National Thermal Power Corporation’s (NTPC) flagship project in the state of Assam in the North Eastern Part of the country. The project is being constructed at an existing plant of Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) of 60X4 MW capacity which was closed due to very low Power Load Factor (PLF) of about 4-5. However, since inception, the project was marred and plagued by various external factors and problems which delayed its completion for a prolonged period. Many of the problems are presented in this study. By meticulously adopting various modern management principle, NTCP managed to build the confidence of stake holders and statutory authorities. It has earned the endorsement and support of local governance / administration and has re-instilled faith and morale of the employees. Sustained operational outputs are achieved by maintaining realistic target with shorter time milestones of the project. This case is a classic example of reviving a delayed project by implementing modern management principles. Key learning points from the project are presented in this study.

Abstract This paper studies the influence of adult education program on to the prevalent agricultural wages in villages of India. Adult education program in India is conducted by various state governments irrespective of the consideration of village characteristics. We argue village characteristics as an important variable towards the success of any government program. The objective of any government program in villages is to improve the economic status of villagers. Prevalent agricultural wages are a good indicator of the economic well-being of rural inhabitants. Therefore, as an indicator of economic development of Indian rural population, we have selected agricultural wages as the dependent variable. In earlier studies, there are predominantly four significant determinants of agricultural wages. They are non-agricultural, transportation, regional, and local factors. After controlling for these factors, we have found that adult education has significant positive influence on the larger size of villages and in a smaller size of villages, it does not have any influence. We have used robust regression technique in our analysis due to the presence of outliers in the data.

(Received 26 January 2017; received in revised form 12 May 2017; accepted 19 June 2017)

Abstract This paper examines the outcome of selection of inorganic mode of expansion by Vodafone Group Plc. in its brown field investment of $18.2 billion in India. This work investigate the achievement of operating performance by Vodafone India in Hutch-Essar deal, upto five year post acquisition, against a benchmark established using the concept of Economic Value Added. This work is an attempt by author to have deeper investigation in M&A deal by firstly establishing the threshold limit of performance and then evaluating the actual performance of the deal against the benchmark established.The deal resulted in the overall negative operating performance for Vodafone India. Operating performance of Vodafone India, after acquisition of Hutch-Essar, improved in following years of deal (Refer Analysis table in the last section- refer Improvement in EVA values for the years 2008, 2009, 2010) but increased cost of operations and immense competition in the telecom sector made it difficult for Vodafone to sustain such improvement in operating performance.

AbstractThe purpose of this perspective article is to review the development of Operation Research (OR) as a discipline in the Indian context. Based on this review, we suggest a plan to re-energize the discipline

(Received 23 January 2017; received in revised form 12 May 2017; accepted 27 June 2017)

Abstract The operational efficiency of chemical industry is determined by identifying the technical and scale efficiencies by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) models. A set of 172 companies with average data collected for the year 2005–2006 to 2009–2010 is used for the study. The analysis begins with a benchmark study, followed by identification of peers and their followers. Twelve firms emerge as peers. The slacks of the inefficient firms are identified. Regression analysis is used to estimate the causal relationship between operational efficiency and the other chosen variables. Analyses of peer firms are conducted to identify the influencing variables of the peer firms. The first stage DEA analysis reveals that the inefficiencies such as scale and technical inefficiencies exist in the Indian chemical industry and a majority of inefficient firms are operating in the increasing returns to scale region. The second stage analysis using the OLS regression to identify the determinants of these inefficiencies reveals that net working capital to total assets ratio is contributing significantly to the inefficiencies.

(Received 5 April 2017; received in revised form 9 September 2017; accepted 27 September 2017)

Abstract In this paper, the problem of time to recruitment is studied for a single grade manpower system with voluntary and involuntary loss of manpower (depletion of manpower) due to n types of policy decisions with different attrition rates using univariate CUM policy of recruitment based on shock model approach. Two mathematical models are constructed and analytical results for the variance of time to recruitment are derived using a different probabilistic analysis when (i) the loss of manpower form a sequence of independent and identically distributed 2-stage hyper-exponential random variables (ii) for Model-I the inter-decision times are independent and identically distributed hyper-exponential random variables and (iii) for Model-II the inter-decision times form a geometric process. The influence of nodal parameters on the mean time to recruitment is studied numerically and relevant findings and conclusions are presented.

(Received April 2 2017; received in revised form September 9 2017; accepted October 2 2017)

Abstract In this paper a single grade organization is considered in which loss of manpower (referred as wastage) occurs due to its policy decisions. A stochastic model is constructed by assuming that the inter-decision times form a sequence of exchangeable and constantly correlated exponential random variables and wastages form an order statistics. Variance of time to recruitment is obtained using an univariate recruitment CUM policy based on shock model approach and the analytical results are numerically illustrated by assuming specific distribution for wastages and threshold. The influence of the nodal parameters on the performance measures and the relevant conclusions on the behaviour of the three models are highlighted from the numerical illustration.

(Received 2 April 2017; received in revised form 27August 2017; accepted 3 September 2017)

Abstract In this paper, an approach is suggested to study the impact of time windows based on urban freight regulations on product cost at firm level. An initial classification is done regarding Policy-focused research work and Vehicle Route Optimisation studies. It is observed that there are less evidences that firms or supply chains in the developing countries understand the effect of urban freight issues and regulations applied to them. In addition, cost aspect of time windows restriction has not been well studied from the supply chain perspective. To study the effect, a decision-making and cost bearing matrix was developed for Retailer and Supplier. Bi-level programming model was developed to quantify the effect of cost of the regulation at the product level. A case study of an India based multinational carbonated beverage company is taken up for validating the model carried out. We found that urban freight regulations related to time-window restrictions affected the cost from 0.00 to 2.33% (supplier) of the product retail price. Suppliers bearing the cost of product-movement are more affected by regulations than the retailers. Finally, we found that considering the existing low levels of tolls and penalty charges, larger vehicles are more cost efficient.

(Received 23 January 2017; received in revised form 6 May 2017; accepted 8 June 2017)

AbstractBy considering a Markovian queueing model with balking, the maximum likelihood and consistent estimators of modified traffic intensity are obtained based on the number of entities present at several sampled time points. Uniform minimum variance unbiased estimator (UMVUE), consistent asymptotically normal (CAN) estimator and an asymptotic confidence interval for the expected number of entities in the system are obtained. Further, Bayes estimators of modified traffic intensity, measures of system performance, minimum posterior risk and minimum Bayes risk associated with these estimators are also derived. The behavior of maximum likelihood and Bayes estimators of modified traffic intensity is illustrated through simulation study. The results obtained from the simulation study show that as the number of sampled time points increases, the expected value of the MLE of modified traffic intensity approaches its true value. The minimum Bayes risk of the estimator of modified traffic intensity also decreases.